


Madness in its Truest Form

by musicaldork



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator (Movies)
Genre: Animal Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Original Character(s), Taxidermy, this is a story about my ocs being strange and worrisome in the reanimator universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24998188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicaldork/pseuds/musicaldork
Summary: Normalcy is a farce, held in place by tempered expectation.There is nothing normal about Mr. Herbert West.Nor is there anything normal about the nature of his aberrant experimentations.As he inadvertently begins to pull others down with him, in an obsessive desire to spite god - with great tears and reckless bloodshed - it is almost a surety that not a single one of them will go quietly into the night.
Relationships: Daniel Cain/Megan Halsey, Herbert West (Re-Animator)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

I have little regret for the part I played in the madness.

_I regret all of it - and yet I could not have done anything more._

It would be criminal not to pursue the underbelly of such revolutionary work.

_Inhuman. Cruel. Daemonic. I saw it, heeded the warnings, and I did not stop it._

It is something so deeply fascinating that he could not have stopped me if he tried.

_My innumerable failures haunt me still. I shall never sleep again._

**Come now.** There are experiments to be done.

\---

_The splintering crunch of a pencil, snapped clean in two, rang throughout the classroom._

It was ignored until it could be no longer.

This action came from a silent, young man who was almost entirely unremarkable in every single way.

Clean-cut and bespectacled, he was unremarkable, of course, aside from the nigh-catlike pettiness that came off of him in cold, sullen waves. 

With effective immediacy, this dubious behaviour marked him as a man entirely different from the rest.

_Herbert West._

He was a slight, brooding man, whose eyes beheld a startling placidity despite the spiteful gleam behind them. 

Bright behind their wireframes, he stared down the teacher with a deliberate impudence that drew the reluctant intrigue of one Ms. Lydia Desjardins. 

A quiet, rather austere girl, she was often found tucked into the emptiest back corner of her classes.

She was most well-known amongst her peers for the discomfiting nature of her stare - dark and eerily wide-eyed, reminiscent of the startled prey animal.

This girl found herself at once aghast, yet morbidly fascinated by the display - the most blatantly transparent powerplay she had ever borne witness to.

_Snap._

Another pencil.

This wordless protest from West was distraction enough that it made it near-impossible to focus properly on the demonstration at the front of the room.

But even distractedly so, the teacher’s practised scalping of a newly-dead cadaver was met with a roil of interest and thinly-veiled disgust through the crowd of green medical students.

Interest seemed too insignificant a word for the reaction of Ms. Myra Bacani.

Seated in the frontrow of the class, she scribbled down her notes with an unrestrained, childlike _glee_ that was nothing short of _deeply unsettling_.

It was one thing to be a conscientious student, but it was another thing entirely to look so… enamoured by the wet crunch of flesh, separating cleanly from bone. 

_It’s of no matter to me,_ Lydia supposed - though she resolved to hold the woman at a distance, with dull caution in the back of her mind.

Tuning away from her scattered thoughts and back in to the lecture, she found that Dr. Carl Hill’s dull attempts at humour did nothing to quell the awkward tension in the room.

His sleazy smile as he compared the action to _‘peeling a large orange’_ only served to make the majority of his students feel immediately ill.

And in spite of herself, Lydia could not shake the feeling of there being something deeply and intrinsically _wrong_ with the man.

His pale eyes - _sunken deeply into their sockets_ \- were grim with the glassy quality of the dead; beady and snakelike in a way that made her want to never turn and look at him again. 

There was the pervasive and uncomfortable sense that you were dealing with variables outside of your control and understanding every second you held his gaze, no matter how fleeting the moment.

...Watching the two of them stare each other down, Lydia could not fathom how they could possibly do it. 

_(‘I would’ve liked to avert my gaze, but morbid curiosity fixed me in place,’ she would later recount in hushed tones.)_

Every single student there found themselves unwittingly caught inside this silent, uncomfortable rift between West and Dr. Hill. With bated breaths, everybody wondered the same question in its exactitude: 

_Who would bend first?_

It would set the tone for the rest of the class, to be sure. 

_Who held the authority here?_

The tension reached a fever pitch. Another pencil, snapped until-

_“Mr. West. I suggest you get yourself a pen. Class dismissed.”_

A wave of relief swept palpable through the room, the students desperately welcoming in any sense of reprieve - more than ready to suck in a breath of unstifled air and leave the agitation at the door where it stood.

The only one who seemed unaffected by the whole affair was Ms. Bacani, who lacked the social graces to recognise it.

Or perhaps she did note the tension, and simply did not care to acknowledge it.

_“...Wasn’t that SO interesting? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten such a closeup view of a real life human brain before! And I have always had SUCH an interest in the function of the brain, especially with regards to the unregulated multiplication of cells there-”_

Lydia could hear the gushing of that same student - Myra, was it? - begin to fade past the short boundary of the doorframe, voice a touch too loud for the setting, sparkling with manic enthusiasm. 

A strange woman, truly.   
Perhaps she herself wasn’t one to talk.

Snapping her notebook shut, she began to pack away her belongings, meticulously tucking them away into a small rucksack. 

She was the second last student to leave the classroom.

Just before she left the room, she spared a glance to the space where Herbert still seemed to be seated, unmoving.

Unexpectedly, she met his eye.

Visibly, he seemed to size her up, with a gaze as cold and detached as ever.  
In return, she made no move to hide her outright curiosity of him.

Neither party looked away. 

Strange. Wide-eyed. Unflinching.   
Unlike most, he did not recede, nor recoil, nor wither beneath the intensity of her stare.  
And if he was at all unnerved, he did not show it.

He simply stared back.  
And she, him.

After a split second that seemed to stretch out into the impossibility of an aeon, Lydia left the room _post haste_ , at once thrumming with question, and with his idiosyncrasies on her mind.

_...Herbert West._

A name that in future would surely be of note, in some way or another.

Be it for reasons of good, or of undue recrimination in its absolute, still remained to be seen.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This chapter deals heavily with taxidermy and a dead bird, so read with caution if you're sensitive to topics like that!)

_Drip. Drip. Drip._

An innocuous, repetitive sound comes into sharp focus.

A sink with a leaky faucet whispers out against a steel basin.

In the quiet, it shares its space only with the light breathing of the woman seated at her desk.

Animals have always remained Myra’s wordless companions. The taxidermied glassy eyes of the ‘no longer living’ stare out accusingly from the walls. They bare artificial teeth, lips curled and raised in the state of the perpetual silent snarl.

Myra pays them no mind.

Jars of formalin-soaked eyeballs live alongside a collection of lovingly-bleached skull and bone. Amongst them stayed a collection of bugs housed in frame, polished animal teeth, as well as a great variety of preserved pelts and hides, numbering in the high tens.

The acrid chemical stench of preservatives, epoxy resin and fresh, coppery blood, culminate into something cloying and musty - and altogether far too disgusting. It bites into the air and refuses to let go, saturating the room in its entirety - bleeding out into walls that watch the woman work.

It’d be nigh unbearable for most, but Myra does not flinch nor gag. She is unfazed by the smell, having grown accustomed to it from innumerable exposures - wholly desensitised to the state of perma-death and haltered decay.

Few would know of the horrors housed in that little attached garage, repurposed in such zealous, grotesque fashion.

Myra unwraps a small bird from its temporary plastic-covering. Parasite-free from meticulous examination - and still sweet with youth. The poor thing. Gone too soon. At least its senseless death would come of some use.

She begins to dissect the animal with gleaming silver scalpel blade, nudging teal-framed glasses further up her nose with her forearm.

The glint of the tool catches the light - the dim light of a single flickering, dying filament, one that casts a sickly yellow glow across the room.

Her work takes little time to complete, so practised she could potentially skin a creature in her sleep.

By the time the doorbell rings, she’s already stripping off her bloodied, nitrile gloves, startling at the sound.

_Oh! A visitor!_

The moment she enters the front room of the house, the two women at the door turn and stare at her like they’ve been caught committing a crime.

“Hiya, Megan! How _are_ you?”

Tall, serious and gawky. Blonde, bubbly and gorgeous.

Megan Halsey and Lydia Desjardins made up the most unlikely of interpersonal pairings.

The two met circumstantially over a charity fundraiser organised by Dean Halsey.

Lydia - having only signed up for organising logistics in the hidden background of the event - had been left in a blind panic after suddenly being assigned a bout of unplanned public speaking. Megan had been her saving grace, taking over the obligation on her behalf. And she had been grateful for it.

Luck had looped them into a friendship that likely wouldn’t have blossomed in any other context. But even so, they were thankful for each other.

While Megan grew fond of her timid, yet refreshingly earnest companion, Lydia quickly became protective over Megan in return - acting as a silent guard against those who thought her ‘less than’ intellectually, on account of her beauty.

“How’s Dan?”

“Thank you for asking- he’s fine. We’re still having a lot of trouble with talking everything through with daddy but it’s almost a sure thing. And I think he’ll come around with time. But that’s not what I came here for. I just… need to vent?”

Encouraged by a small nod from her friend, Megan takes a deep breath to steady herself - and continues.

“You know, that new medical student? I think he’s in your class. Herbert. Herbert West? He showed up on our doorstep tonight. And now, he’s Dan’s new roommate. And it just doesn’t sit right with me. He gives me the _creeps_. I just can’t put it into _words_.”

Imploring words growing more frantic in her upset, Megan is suddenly steamrollered in conversation by the blaring interruption of Myra’s happy, foghorn voice - supplying a character assessment wholly dubious from the perspective of her.

“Mr. West? He’s an interesting sort, isn’t he? Like, a couple of weeks ago, he and Dr. Hill were tearing each other a new one straight after class! You could hear it through the door; down the hall, even.”

Snapping out of her frozen, deer-in-headlights state, Lydia could tell that her disjointed rambling was beginning to grate against the fragility of her friend’s already shattered nerves.

“-something about the theory of irreversible brain death after 6-12 minutes - apparently disproven and stolen research from a Dr. Hans Gruber, according to West. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but it was all very fascinating stuff-”

_Enough was enough._

Humouring her with noncommittal, intermittent hums of faux-engagement, Lydia laid a gentle hand on Myra’s shoulder and guided her away from the front-door, ushering her away as casual as anything.

Myra didn’t seem to notice nor care until she was almost out of the room - none the wiser to the fact that neither women were truly listening to her enthusiastic conjecture.

“…I’d love to pick his brains at some point- ha! Get it? Brains! Cause… we were dealing with brains in class…? Huh? Well, bah, I thought it was funny. Hm. So, where was I?-”

Talking excitedly with her hands, it was the small things Lydia found herself grateful for; thankful that Myra had stripped off her gloves before coming up to speak - garments covered in blood, cerebrovascular fluid and god knows what else.

Meandering out of the room, she left with little resistance, chattering happily to herself all the way.

The moment she was presumed out of earshot, the two remaining women let out a connected breath they hadn’t realised they’d been holding.

“…Lydia?”

Megan met her friend’s eyes with a wide stare, wild with unabated worry.

Lydia was fixed in place by a rare, genuine fear from Megan; its impact was not lost on her.

“I don’t know why. But something in my gut tells me that it’s a bad idea letting him stay in that house. I don’t want him to stay, but I don’t think I can convince Dan otherwise. I don’t know what I _can_ do.”

Her voice breaks and hinges on the second-last word of her rant, and it makes Lydia’s heart squeeze painfully in her chest. She’s never heard her sound quite so

“I can’t say that I know exactly how you feel. I do not. But I think in the end it will be alright. He seems strange, a little self-involved, maybe. That’s true. But he doesn’t seem _dangerous_. This feeling of anxiety you feel around him? May pass with time. And you will be alright on the other side of it.”

A split-second of silent debate in her mind led her to take Megan’s hand, squeezing lightly for emphasis.

She felt a returning squeeze and felt heartened, ploughing onwards in her deeply stilted and unpolished attempt at comfort.

“You know what my maman used to teach me? Zeno’s paradox. That, in the middle of any two given points, there would always be halfway to go in between them. A new halfway, and a halfway between that - and so on and so forth. So we will take this problem one halfway at a time, yes? Is that okay?”

Her collection of jumbled, awkward reassurance is heartfelt and well-meant as it comes.

But with a sinking feeling buried deep in the pit of her stomach, Lydia finds that she isn’t quite so sure of any of it herself anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Fun Not-so-fun Fact: Some of Myra’s taxidermy is mildly illegal, as she does not adhere to state laws surrounding keeping work done of certain species.)

**Author's Note:**

> Find me at dorkfanfic on tumblr! :D  
> I'm always very excited to hear about other people's Re-Animator OCs, so if you ever wanna chat about anything, head my way!  
> You'll find random fun facts about my OCs there too.
> 
> Also, I take fanfic requests there and they're pretty much perpetually open, so there's that! 
> 
> Thank you for reading! :)


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